Monday, April 2, 2012

The passive voice is a hoax!

Excessive use of the passive voice in science writing is a self-perpetuated, mutually-perpetrated hoax. To prove it, I am offering a $100 bounty for the first person who can find a journal that explicitly requires authors to write in the passive voice.

UPDATE April 4, 2012: To my shock and dismay, the bounty has been claimed! See the new HALL OF SHAME below.

Most style guides recommend the active voice, and most readers prefer it. But in some academic fields, especially the sciences, authors use a stilted and awkward style that replaces clear concise sentences like, "We performed the experiment," with circumlocutions like "The experiment was performed."

Asked why they write like that, many scientists admit that they don't like it, but they are under the impression that journals require it. They are wrong. Of the journals that have style guides, the vast majority explicitly ask authors to write in the active voice.

Here's what you can do to help stop the carnage:

If you are writing scientific articles in the passive voice, check the style guide for your journals. Unless you are explicitly required to write in the passive voice, don't!

If you are reviewing articles, check the style guide for your journals. Unless the passive voice is explicitly required, don't "correct" sentences in the active voice.

If you are the editor of a scientific journal, make sure that your style guide explicitly recommends the active voice, and make sure authors and reviewers are aware of your recommendation.

If you are teaching students to write scientific papers in the passive voice, STOP! There is no reason for students to practice bad writing. If, at some point in the future, they actually have to write like that, they can write a first draft in the active voice and then translate.

If you know of any other style guides that make a recommendation on this topic, let me know and I will add them to this page. So far I haven't found any that actually call for the passive voice.

"Nature journals like authors to write in the active voice ("we performed the experiment..." ) as experience has shown that readers find concepts and results to be conveyed more clearly if written directly."

The Nature Editorial Staff comment on their style recommendations here, and here is a collection of letters to Nature on this topic.

"... we do not have a style guide for authors beyond what can be found in the Information for Authors page (http://www.pnas.org/misc/iforc.shtml#prep). There are no rules recommending passive vs. active voice in research articles. I would recommend looking at some PNAS articles in your specific area of interest to get a flavor of the style used."

However, their Production Department adds:

"[We] feel that accepted best practice in writing and editing favors active voice over passive."

Note: many thanks to my correspondent at PNAS for permission to include these quotes.

If the ACM has a style guide I can't find it, but one of their publications, Crossroads, does, and it couldn't be clearer:

"Active voice replaces passive voice whenever possible."

A reader sent me the following note:

The American Chemical Society Style Guide, 3rd Edition writes as follows: "Use the active voice when it is less wordy and more direct than the passive." And "Use first person when it helps to keep your meaning clear and to express a purpose or a decision."

The following are journals whose style guides do not address this issue, which I take as implicit permission to use the active voice, as recommended by virtually all non-scientific style guides:

Their instructions call for "good scientific American English," but they don't address the issue of voice explicitly.

They also suggest, "For general format and style, consult recent issues of the Journal." I chose an
article at random and found that it was generally in the active voice:

"We realized the described structure by first creating a 2D hexagonal pattern of etch pits..." with only a few unfortunate uses of the passive voice: "...to reduce therewith the number of stitching
interfaces, the magnification of the FIB images was reduced."

So I take that as implicit permission to write in the active voice...and to use the word "therewith".

Amdur et al measure the use of passive voice in medical articles and find that 20-30% of sentences are passive, compared with 3-5% in their reference corpus, the Wall Street Journal. They write:

"We could not find a survey study or consensus statement addressing the question of why authors of medical journal articles use the passive voice so frequently. No publication guideline mentions goals or limits for the use of the passive voice, and some of the most prestigious references are worded in a way that may encourage authors to use the passive voice whenever it is acceptable to do so. For example, the AMA Manual of Style says that, 'Authors should use the active voice, except in instances in which the actor is unknown or the interest focuses on what is acted on.'"

One point of clarification: I am not an absolutist on this issue. The passive voice has its uses. What I am objecting to is the obsolete tradition of writing scientific papers primarily in the passive voice. Finally, please do not send me email triumphantly pointing out the (occasional and appropriate) use of the passive voice in my essays.

The fine print

I am offering a $100 bounty for the first person who can find a journal that explicitly requires authors to write in the passive voice. It has to be a mainstream English-language journal with an online style guide that recommends or requires the passive voice for published articles. I'll only pay one bounty, to the person whose email gets to my inbox first. Send email to downey@allendowney.com. I will be the sole arbiter of whether a submission meets these criteria, but I promise to be reasonable. I will post the winning submission here.

Background: I wrote this essay several years ago. Lately I have heard from several readers pointing to additional resources, so I thought I would update the article, clean up some broken links, and move it from my web page to my blog. Comments and additional resources are welcome.

THE HALL OF SHAME

In response to my bounty, I heard from several readers who found journals that explicitly ask authors to use the passive voice.

Note too that the Journal prefers text to be written in the passive voice (e.g. “An experiment on XXX was undertaken …”) rather than in the active voice (e.g. “I undertook an experiment on XXX …”), though modest use of the active voice is acceptable.

David Weisman reported the style guide for Clinical Oncology and Cancer Research, which recommends:

Materials and Methods: Use the "passive voice" when describing experimental detail.

Note too that they compound the offence with spurious use of "quotation marks."

Donna Tucker found a borderline case. She wrote, "The American Meteorological Society no longer recommends the use of passive voice. It has not been that many years since they did... They do, however, have specific requirements for the abstract...

First person construction should not be used in the abstract, and references should be omitted because they are not available per se to abstracting services.

Donna continues, "So if I cannot say 'We collected the data.' I am left with 'The data were collected'. Although this requirement does not explicitly mandate the use of the passive voice, it does make it unavoidable in certain circumstances." The journal gets extra demerits for gratuitous use of "per se."

13 comments:

I can confirm that the Physical Review journals, as well as every other physics / astronomy journal I've published in, allow the active voice. I use it most of the time and have never gotten a complaint from an editor.

Psychology grad student here. Our teachers encouraged us to use the active voice, and all social science journals allow it. I struggle with it as i tend to slip into passive voice mode without thinking about it. Luckily my wife is more in tune with writing and corrects my poor passive passages!

I am undecided. I wrote my dissertation in the singular (at my adviser's insistence), and I write this blog in the singular (obviously), but for most of my single-authored papers, we are magically plural.

Whenever I see a single author use "we" for self-reference, I always wonder whether to attribute this to pregnancy or tapeworms. The New York Times Magazine had an article on this subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0

Reviewer 1: There are too many subjective wording through this manuscript, such as "I consider" (line 57), "I identify" (line 81), "I solve" (line 179) etc. All these sentences need to be reconstructed into the passivity sentences to qualify for the scientific writing.

Reviewer 2: The first-person narrative was also distracting. Otherwise it was well written.

I'm now in the midst of analyzing a set of documents from Folia Zoologica, and -- surprise, surprise -- they too advocate the use of the passive. Here's the advice to authors (http://www.ivb.cz/pubser_en.htm):

"Text should not be written in first person, the passive voice should be used."

You'll want to add the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, which very explicitly says, "All papers should all be written in third person, passive voice." Having perused their journal, though, I noticed that not all of their articles even do that!